1. Technical Field
This invention relates to telecommunications processing system architectures. In particular, this invention relates to providing secure and controlled third party access to telecommunication service provider functionality.
2. Related Art
Rapid advances in data processing and telecommunications technology have lead to a vast array of communication services available to the consumer. Such telecommunications services include traditional telephone service, Internet service, cable television service, cellular phone service, paging service, combined voice and data delivery service, and many other services. Furthermore, many services may be either wireless or wireline based.
Established telecommunications service providers have invested enormous amounts of time, money, and advanced technology to implement and reliably provide a broad spectrum of telecommunication products and services. In the past, this investment has been of primary benefit only to the telecommunications service provider. That is, the telecommunications service providers internally maintained their own technologies in confidence and for their own use.
Against this backdrop of sophisticated telecommunications architectures is the desire within each telecommunications service provider to explore and develop new business opportunities which lead to new revenue channels. Existing technology in the service provider architectures could drive such new revenue channels. However, in the past there was no sufficiently secure, flexible, and efficient mechanism which allowed third parties to access underlying functionality in service provider architectures.
A need has long existed for enhanced telecommunications service provider architectures.